Modern electronics, such as telecommunications equipment, is commonly contained in a housing or chassis. The chassis may serve many functions, including providing structural support for the contents, providing a common electrical ground, providing protection from electromagnetic interference (EMI), and others.
For many applications (e.g., telecommunications centers, server farms, etc.) it has is become common practice to stack multiple individual electronics chassis in specialized racks. Further, multiple racks may be arranged in a side-by-side manner. These arrangements allow for reducing the space required to house multiple such electronics chassis.
Within certain industries, there are standards organizations that have promulgated specifications for certain types of electronics chassis. One example of such an organization is the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) and an example of such a specification is PICMG 3.0 Rev. 1.0 or as further updated, more commonly known as the Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) specification.
Along with voluminous other requirements, the ATCA specification specifies the mechanical configuration of a backplane within a housing, the number, size, and relative spacing of circuit boards (referred to as blades) that are retained within the housing and which electrically connect to the backplane. The ATCA specification also specifies the characteristics of the circuit ground provided for the blades, and the cooling and air filtering requirements for the housing.
Although the ATCA has provided a significant improvement with respect to providing standardized component interfaces and operability, several of the design specifications have failed to account for the growth in the processing speed and density of electronics board. For instance, processing speeds of the equipment housed by the chassis has increased faster than anticipated by the ATCA. Further, there is a direct relationship between speed and power consumption; the faster the processor speed the higher the power consumption of the processor. Accordingly, continued growth in processing speeds and/or electronics density results in the need to dissipate a greater amount of heat by an ATCA chassis
It is against this background that the present invention has been developed.